Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce at Miscellany Room 15.
Last weekend my wife and I were sitting outside at our favourite local cafe. A woman sat down at the next table. On her jacket were a number of embroidered patches. One was “NO MEANS NO.” Another said “PROTECT TRANS LIVES.” Oblivious, unironic, culture civil-war in a single jacket.
Trans lives are no way in danger, but wearing this patch is supposed to make us believe they are. They’re not an endangered species, but slogans like this are just a part of the “NO DEBATE!” gambit, which is designed to protect the ideology as much as, if not more than, trans people themselves. We have more than enough instances where questions and criticism of genderism are taken as “denying trans people’s right to exist”. This patch is basically more of the same, thought-terminating transperbole. (Pointing out the relative safety of the trans demographic would make me a transphobic bigot plotting trans genocide, exactly the sort of person against whom this this baby blue, pink, and white patch is supposed to act as a shield and talisman.)
I’d spotted the “NO MEANS NO” patch first, but somehow suspected the other one (or something like it) would be there too. Trans “rights” (at least those espoused by and for TiMs) depend almost entirely upon the violation of women’s boundaries, the deliberate flouting of “No means no.” I thought she was lucky that her jacket didn’t spontaneously combust from the cognitive dissonance to which it had been subjected.
As a coda, just before we left, while my wife was using the bathroom, the first woman was joined at her table by a second. Soon after, a TiM who was a mutual friend of the two women showed up, and Ms. Jacket (after shrieking in delighted shock at Mr. Tim’s dyed blonde hair) asked me if “she” could have the empty seat my wife was no longer using. I said sure, as we were leaving soon. Mr. Tim was taller than I am, had an unremarkable, though distinctly male voice, and sported five o’clock shadow. He wore leggings that left no doubt as to the nature of his “material reality.” I wondered if this guy was part of the impetus behind the “PROTECT TRANS LIVES” badge. I wondered if he had ever broken the spirit of the other badge by entering women’s spaces under the cover of the central lie of transactivism, that men can be women? I wondered, if push came to shove, whose side Ms. Jacket would take if a woman were to object to her male friend’s use of a woman’s restroom or changing space? Sadly, I think I already know the answer. I suspect she would protect her friend’s “trans life” by letting him violate a woman’s “No.”
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